Index > I knew there would be a "Cujo" remake someday
Posted by Joe (@joe) on March 19, 2025, 4:19 p.m.
An attempt to siphon off some MAGA bros by making them fall in love with the post-WWII, pre-Vietnam anti-communist left? People call the book “right wing” but J-Ro had it right (and is really just citing someone else anyway)
As critic H. Bruce Franklin rightly points out in his 1980 book Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction, the writer’s “right-wing” militarism actually reflects the liberal ideology of John F. Kennedy, who was elected president a year after the novel was published. The armed force in Starship Troopers anticipates the creation of the elite Green Berets; Kennedy’s signature “Ask not what your country can do for you” speech also seems to come straight out of the novel. Written as Heinlein’s 13th in a juvenile series for Scribner’s (a series celebrating the conquest of space whose first filmic incarnation was the 1950 Destination Moon, adapted from Rocket Ship Galileo), the book was rejected for its extreme and unapologetic militarism, then published as an adult novel by Putnam. It’s another indication of how much we’ve changed in 38 years that adults in 1959 had the quaint notion of shielding teenage boys from this sort of thing — though the novel lacked most of the movie’s graphic gore (which is now aimed at them).
Franklin also points out that Starship Troopers — which is as steeped in cold war ideology as Heinlein’s 1951 The Puppet Masters, and thus in striking contrast to his neo-hippie and neo-communist Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) — suggests that the alien bugs represent Chinese communists and that another humanoid race (the “Skinnies,” omitted in the movie) reflects Russian communists. In fact the novel is crammed with pompous lectures about the communist menace and the errors of Karl Marx, most of them linked to the bugs’ “hive” mentality — which makes it all the more ironic that the classless military utopia Heinlein proffers as an ideal alternative is no less socialist and totalitarian. The movie actually intensifies this paradox by showing how impossible it is for Johnny to speak to his girlfriend or his parents on the videophone without all his bunk mates being present.
That’s not the only place I’ve seen someone point out that the world of Starship Troopers sounds more like The Soviet Union than America (it is, mercifully for a military adventure novel being filed during the second Trump administration, at least the post-Stalinist Soviet Union).
J-Ro must have hated it when people overheard it phone calls, since he also calls this out in his review of The Dead Poet’s Society
Peter Weir (Witness) directs Robin Williams as a popular, freethinking English teacher in a strict boys’ prep school who inspires his students to think for themselves. The major problem with this 1989 male weepie is Tom Schulman’s script, which falters on several counts: the story is supposed to be taking place in 1959, but apart from a couple of rock songs there’s not even an attempt to capture the period; the moral divisions set up between characters are childishly overdrawn; and, worst of all, the behavior shown by the boys and adults frequently reeks of falsity and contrivance, despite a generally able cast that includes Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, Gale Hansen, and Dylan Kussman. (To cite one instance out of many, what teenage boy of your acquaintance would invite all his buddies to surround him while he telephones the girl of his dreams?) Sometimes Weir’s directorial craft makes one overlook some of the wobbles of this teetering vehicle, but at other times he makes things worse by stretching out some of the dramatic climaxes interminably. Williams is as good as ever, but as in Good Morning, Vietnam, the concerted effort to soften his rough edges doesn’t really enhance his talent. 128 min. (JR)